“To eat good food is to be close to God,” says Primo, the passionate chef in Big Night. The 1996 film tells of two Italian brothers’ desperate attempt to keep a “quality” Italian restaurant alive while a crummy spaghetti-and-meatball joint down the street thrives. Kansas City diners appreciate their efforts. The Big Night dinner has been one of the…
At the time, it was meant to be read as a great compliment: Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez create comic books for people who don’t read comic books! A publisher or pitchman couldn’t have come up with a more glorious phrase, one magical sentence that would reel in the literate and their loot. Finally, it was safe for the straight and…
Away from it all: If your New Year’s resolutions include losing a little weight in the coming year (as mine did), you might be wary about future food outings. After all, Kansas City’s signature dishes are steaks and barbecue — with the new, tony Fiorella’s Jack Stack being the most stylish vendor of get-down food like onion rings; beef, pork…
After living, working and eating in the greater Kansas City area for nearly 17 years now, I want to know just one thing: What the hell is Kansas City barbecue? And where is it, anyway? In his hefty 1998 book, The Barbecue Bible, writer and frequent TV morning-show cook Steven Raichlen compares Kansas City barbecue to its counterparts in…
11 Thursday It’s that time of year when the novelty of winter has worn off and many people start to feel as if they’ve been cooped up inside for too long. Friends of the Johnson County Libraries comes to the rescue just in time with the Cabin Fever Fiction Book Sale from 5 to 8:30 p.m. at 8700 Shawnee…
Opera singer Roberta Gumbel, who’s coming to town to perform in Kansas City’s Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration, sang in 2000’s festivities too. But a lot has changed for her since then. The Kansas City native, who lives in New York, had a baby last year. “I’m kind of in a mother mode,” says Gumbel, whose repertoire for Friday night’s…
As the kickoff of a proposed “Hollywood on Stage” series at the Alanz Theatre, where scripts reportedly are downloaded from the Internet, All About Eve gives new meaning to the phrase “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” It is wobbly as parody because it’s not very funny. And its liberties with the story (a dropped scene here, an…
Back in the B.C. (Before Cobain) era, rock bands liked to prove how “bad” they were by covering the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” Megadeth had (emphasis on “had”) enough political awareness in 1988 to scrape by with its subpar rendition, but Mötley Crüe? Come now. Rage Against the Machine avoids such obvious and played-out reference points on its…
There has to be a reason for a Robert Johnson tribute — you can’t toss one together just because, you know, some blues people have the time, they’re on the same label, and so forth. Luckily, the folks who put together Dealin’ with the Devil understand the deal that must be made. For decades, guitarists have been drooling over Johnson’s…
Young bands that lack original material often cover songs by their primary influences to take up space in concert. Neither desecration nor reinterpretation, these quickie covers tend to lack the craft and care that made the originals worth covering. The nicest thing that can be said about Take a Bite Outta Rhyme: A Rock Tribute to Rap is that a…
If imitation is truly the highest form of flattery, then the spirit of Jimi Hendrix must be eternally blushing, or just red-hot with rage. Few artists in the past 50 years have been covered as often as Hendrix, and certainly none as poorly. Whether it’s the overzealous high school guitarist taking a painful stab at our national anthem or the…
Anyone who doubts the authenticity of Bruce Springsteen’s delivery — the way the verbose, jocular New Jersey cadence of his early records migrated south to become revivalist shouts or mumbled drawls — need only listen to this tribute disc for proof. Driving through the Boss’ Nebraska in sequence, the artists involved trip over themselves trying not to overthink their interpretations….
In recent years, the term “one-man band” has been used to describe artists (such as Trent Reznor) who record albums in solitary recording sessions using computers and the like, then recruit a band to re-create the tunes on the road. But Bruce Humphries is a throwback one-man band, the type who straps a drum to his foot, a guitar across…
Reaching double digits in issue numbers is the ‘zinester’s equivalent of reaching the 300,000-mile mark on a car. Unfortunately, many writers who peel out of the starting blocks with high hopes of chronicling the music scene’s underrated heroes sputter out after three or four issues, leaving behind a few limited-circulation collector’s items and a mountain of scrap in Kinko’s wastebaskets….
Ryan Olcott is multitasking. At 11:30 on a Wednesday morning, the singer, songwriter and guitarist for the Minneapolis quartet 12 Rods is chewing bacon and playing Donkey Kong. To answer questions about the roller coaster his band rode in 2000, he interrupts his game but not his brunch. “We haven’t made a video for this album,” Olcott says in his…
They don’t give mattresses to inmates on suicide watch. So Linda Rupard’s face is pressed against the bare metal cookie sheet that is her Johnson County jail bed. She lies on her stomach, the most comfortable position she can find. But comfort is relative. Her hands are numb. Not from cold — the cell is stifling hot this November as…
And it came to pass during the eleventh month of the last year of the second millennium of our Lord that a dead man rose up and slew the prophet John Ashcroft. Yet it is written in his own hand that he shall be reborn: “Every time I have ever run for something and lost, some type of ‘resurrection’ has…
Norman Ross started out at Kansas City Power & Light in 1979, never imagining that he would be stuck in an entry-level meter-reading job for 20 years, even after earning a college degree. Now the company may have to pay up for denying Ross promotions because he is black. But the punitive damages will not hit KCPL as hard as…
The turnstiles don’t lie. The more the Kansas City Knights win, the more fans stay away from games. In four home victories posted by the new ABA franchise at Kemper Arena, the attendance figures have gone from an opening-night total of 7,031 fans on December 26 to 3,143 (December 28), 3,032 (December 30) and 2,741 (January 1). For you math…
Grade school: The Kansas City Star is adept at stating the obvious. Witness this recent headline: “Pain — It’s the top reason people see a doctor.” But the paper ignored the obvious in its January 4 coverage of the Kansas Board of Education’s annual building-by-building report on the state’s public schools. The story was thoroughly positive: “Attendance and graduation rates…
Few tools in the world are as obscure as the Brannock device, that flimsy metal contraption used by Al Bundy and shoe salesmen everywhere to determine foot size. And that name, The Brannock Device, is a perfect fit for one of Kansas City’s unique bands. Actually, about fifteen to twenty years ago, there were a lot of groups like this…
The Crying Game We aren’t the champions: Regarding Greg Hall’s “Sack Carl Peterson” (December 28): I grew up in the middle of Kansas, where I rooted for both the Royals and the Denver Broncos. Over the years, the Broncos have won several AFC West championships and two Super Bowls. The Chiefs, a.k.a. the Papooses, just have not done the KC…
Dick Vermeil? Why not get a shovel and dig up Tom Landry? Heck, Vince Lombardi’s name would probably sell a few tickets. Let’s slide a 2-by-6 up the former Packers coach’s backside and prop his corpse up on the Chiefs’ sideline. Carl Peterson hopes firing Gunther Cunningham and courting Vermeil, his longtime friend and the former St. Louis Rams’ Super…
“There are members of the local media who don’t think Gunther will be back next year. There is absolutely no doubt that Gunther Cunningham will be back as the Chiefs’ head coach next year. Those that don’t know that have no idea how Carl Peterson works.” — Bob Gretz, during the second half of the Chiefs’ loss in Atlanta, Chiefs…
